Welsh Parents Defeat State Plan to Take over Home-schooling

Government schooling officials in Wales have backed away from plans to force home-schooling parents to register with the state, thanks to a backlash from outraged parents. According to the BBC:

Opponents said the proposals, put on hold in December 2012, amounted to a licensing scheme for home educators. Under the plans, parents would have needed to apply to join the register and the quality of the environment and education would have been assessed. .

Welsh ministers will issue guidance on home schooling to councils instead. …But [Education Minister Huw Lewis] said the majority of local authorities and children’s organisations believed legislation was ‘absolutely necessary to ensure home-educated children were receiving a suitable education.’

Whether we’re talking about Wales or Washington, DC, we need to ask a fundamental question: what evidence do we have that politicians and special-interest groups (purportedly acting on behalf of “the children”) know best about education?

Well perhaps the Welsh government is a public-schooling powerhouse. Nope.

According results on the international PISA assessment, taken by high school-aged students from 65 countries, Welsh students rank dead last in the United Kingdom in reading, math, and science. Excluding the combined UK country score, Wales ranks 38th in math, 31st in reading, and 25th in science.

American students don’t do much better in the rankings at 37th in math, 24th in reading, and 29th in science—worse than Wales (based on downloadable data provided by the UK’s Guardian newspaper).

Welsh Education Minister Lewis acknowledged that these disappointing results “showed Wales had a long way to go.” Responses from elected officials on both sides of the aisle were much blunter.

It is perversely ironic, then, that politicians such as Welsh Secretary David Jones expect parents to sit idly by and wait for government to “address these serious educational deficiencies and give the young aspirational people of Wales the skills they need to succeed.” Meanwhile, many of those same officials want to put home-schooling parents under the microscope to ensure they’re doing a good enough job educating their children.

It would be a mistake to think what’s going on in Wales can’t happen here.

Even after controlling for various family background differences, such as parents’ education levels, income, and race, home-schooled students score 15-30 percentile points higher on standardized achievement tests that their public school peers. In fact, some research suggests home-school students outperform their public school peers by close to 40 percentile points.

Also, regardless of whether parents are “certified” instructors or not, across grade levels and core subjects such as reading, math, science, and social studies, home-school students score between the 80th and 90th percentiles, compared to public school students who score at the 50th percentile.

These families are also getting results at a fraction of the cost, around $500 per child versus more than $12,000 per public school student—approaching $30,000 depending on the state.

A handful of states know better than to mess with success. Homeschooling in Oklahoma is constitutionally protected, while Idaho doesn’t require parents to get any kind of approval from the state if they prefer to home-school. In New Jersey parents may simply educate their children “elsewhere” besides a school (See p. v).

Of course, an education movement which consistently shows that children can be educated to a standard significantly above the average public school student at a fraction of the cost…will inevitably draw attention from the K-12 public education industry. …

The question HSLDA regularly puts before state legislatures is, ‘If government regulation does not improve the results of home-schoolers why is it necessary?’

Welsh parents have been asking their elected officials the same question—and the answer is the same no matter where in the world parents live: Parents don’t need to depend on government to school their children—especially when governments consistently fail them.

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Independent Women’s Forum’s mission is to improve the lives of Americans by increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty. Sister organization of Independent Women’s Voice.